New 30TB tape is a welcome hold-my-beer moment for Petabyte-scale storage as Seagate and Western Digital smash HDD capacity barrier

Symply Launches the World’s First LTO-10 Tape Storage Range - YouTube

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• 10th generation LTO is finally here, four years after 9th gen launched
• It will have a 30TB capacity, far less than the 48TB originally planned
• LTO roadmap runs to 576TB which may not appear until 2040 at the current rate

If you want to back up tens of petabytes of data or even more, here’s some good news for you. Without much fanfare, IBM, Symply and Spectra Logic have separately made LTO-10 announcements in the past 48 hours.

Announced in 2014, LTO-10 is the 10th iteration of Linear Tape Open technology. This tape media can now reach 30TB native capacity and a staggering 75TB compressed (using the industry standard of 2.5:1 ratio).

Even more surprising is that the transfer rate remained at 400MB/s whereby incremental speed improvements were the norm in the previous nine generations. In theory, filling up an entire tape would take a bit less than a day.

LTO’s taking its time

Even if 30TB sounds fantastic, it is significantly smaller than what was originally proposed. Eight years ago when the LTO organization published their Ultrium roadmap, it listed the LTO-10 as being a 48TB model, that dropped to 36TB in the most recent one, from 2022, and now the actual product launched with ‘only’ 30TB.

That is 67% higher than the capacity of the new LTO-9 tape (18TB) but only 25% higher than that of the old LTO-9 purported tape capacity (24TB). In other words, six LTO-10 tapes can replace 10 LTO-9 tapes.

Back then, the LTO consortium told us, “Doubling capacity approximately every two years is still technically feasible for LTO tape technology and the LTO Program anticipates being able to return to that pattern in future generations”.

Why? Perhaps because the legacy (hard drives) and exotic competitions (ceramic, DNA, silica) aren’t as compelling as originally planned. The first 30TB hard drive launched in January 2024 with 100TB hard drives expected to debut by 2030. LTO-9 hit the market in September 2021 and was delayed by a series of setbacks.

What’s next for LTO?

So one can expect LTO-11 to launch sometime in 2029. LTO’s latest roadmap goes up to LTO-14 with a native capacity of 576TB but this document will almost certainly be changed because of LTO-10’s unexpected (and disappointing) capacity change.

Symply, a storage hardware expert that launched the first LTO-9 tape drive, will start shipping LTO-10 products as early as mid-June 2025 from $11,995 (SAS) with devices equiped with other interfaces (Ethernet and Thunderbolt) costing more.

Symply told TechRadar Pro that they will provide pricing details for LTO-10 media soon. They also told us “the LTO-10 media is 1035m in length which is the same as LTO-9. It is a high density on the media that enable the higher capacity.”

LTO-9 is currently the cheapest of the LTO family, costing around $5 per TB; a 30TB tape would likely sell for more than $150. IBM, one of the founders of LTO, has also announced an LTO 10 tape drive, while Spectra Logic announced support for the new media.

25 years and still going strong

It’s been a quarter of a century already since LTO-1 hit the market and while it has many critics (including within the US government), its resilience, value for money and ability to adapt to countless storage demands makes it a reliable partner regardless of the use case.

We witnessed the demise of competitors (like Sony’s ODA) and while alternative forms of storage (most notably Cerabyte) show exciting potential, they are still very far from reaching the same status as tape.

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